Chapter 6 – And relax…and crawl
Saturday May 2nd
Today’s navigator:
Jet lag saw me awake at 5.10 this morning. Not bad for the second day but, not having gone to sleep until past midnight, I was still tired. Nevertheless, I was awake so decided to make the most of it. After a quick wash, I got dressed and made my way down to the Guest Services area on Deck 3, where I wrote out some more mixology postcards. When I saw signs of life at the Guest Services deck, I also went to check with them that an additional person had been added to the group (I had emailed just before we left but, without access to my emails, wasn’t sure whether it had been confirmed). After finishing writing out the mixology postcard invitations, I decided to get a head start on my steps for the day and set out to deliver those and my recipe postcards. A lady called Liz, from our cruise group, had organised a postcard recipe exchange. We bought postcards from our home town and wrote (or printed) our favourite recipe on the back. There were about 45 people in the exchange so, together with the mixology postcards, I had to cover a lot of the ship.
I started on Deck 2 and worked my way up. At 6.45 I returned everything to the stateroom and headed back to Deck 4 midship to meet the rest of the Disney Wonder-ers (a group of ladies who had been ‘competing’ in Fitbit challenges on the run up to the cruise and wanted to continue in the same fashion whilst on board). There was quite a group of us and we had a very pleasant walk around the deck 4 track, chatting while we went. An hour went past very quickly, with some people dropping out at various points throughout. It was already very warm and by 8 I’d had enough so I left and went back upstairs to get showered, having already achieved my goal of 10,000 steps for today and I hadn’t even had breakfast (eat your heart out Katie Hopkins!) Gary was just waking up so we showered (not together – have you seen the size of the bathrooms on the ship?!) and dressed and made our way up to Beach Blanket Buffet for breakfast. I am very proud of the fact that I can count the number of times I used the lifts (elevators) on the cruise on one hand. I had made a pact that I would always use the stairs, unless there was a good reason why I couldn’t. With the exception of one time, where we went straight from deck 3 to deck 9, and the last day when we had suitcases with us, I didn’t use the elevators at all.
Since I didn’t want to undo all my hard work from this morning’s steps, I had a (somewhat) conservative breakfast of some bacon, a piece of French toast and half an English muffin. Gary had his usual cruise breakfast of 2 boxes of low fat granola.
After breakfast, we decided to go and walk around deck 10. As we were heading towards the steps, we spotted our table mates Julie and Jim so stopped to chat. It was lovely to spend time with them and, before we knew it, it was time for this morning’s talk from Captain Ken Puckett so we made our way down to the Walt Disney Theater with Julie and Jim. Each sea day, on our cruise, Captain Puckett (an ex Panama Canal pilot) gave a presentation about different aspects of the Panama Canal. Today’s talk was on the history of the canal and was very interesting. The presentations were also shown on the TV in the stateroom. My only wish is that they would put each one on a different channel as you had to watch each one, in sequence, to get to the one you had missed/wanted to watch. I actually wrote this on my feedback card at the end of the cruise so it will be interesting to note if there are any changes for the next cruise.
Following Captain Puckett’s presentation, we went to deliver some postcards before meeting some of our fellow cruise group for lunch at Triton’s. Mari and I had been discussing, before we left, about how easy it would be to get to the end of the cruise and not have found time to spend with the people we had been getting to know so well before the cruise. So, with this in mind, we arranged to have lunch together – me and Gary, Mari and her husband, Jeff, and Andrea and Joe (he of ‘pink bra fame’ from the previous night). Mari and Jeff had been to the spa this morning so she did say they might be a little late. While we were waiting, we got chatting to some other cruisers – Dave Z, Dave L, Gail and Janet – and decided that we would all eat lunch together. The dining room were very good about finding a big table for us all and we made our way to our table in the centre of the dining room. Our server was Theo, from South Africa, who had a very posh accent. She was lovely and made us all laugh. As she was taking our order, Mari and Jeff arrived and were able to make a snap decision on food in time to order with us.
Lunch was very pleasant. I had a turkey melt sandwich, which was delicious.
We were all chatting and laughing. Andrea and Joe had bought Gary and I some lovely gifts, including the famous Tastykakes that our friend, Wendy, had told us all about and some Tsum Tsum minis. At one point during lunch, Dave Z asked for chips. Theo bought chips (fries) to the table and there was a lot of laughter as we discussed the different meanings of the word chips. We, of course, had to have dessert. Theo recommended the chocolate dessert, telling us that it was “life changing” so, for that reason Gail decided she had to have it. I was torn but, in the end, decided to have key lime pie. When the desserts came out, some people had little messages on their plates.
I think Dave Z’s was supposed to say FOREVER young…
Gail’s life was changed…
I don’t think Joe was ready…
I think Theo must have decided I needed my life changing too because, along with my key lime pie, she brought me a chocolate dessert too.
Unfortunately, one bite was all I could manage and, for once, Gary wasn’t helping me out.
After lunch, we all went our separate ways, although we would all be seeing each other again very soon at the Pub Crawl. Donna, from our group, had organised an event where we would visit the various bars/lounges on the ship and have a drink at each.
Gary and I popped back to the room to drop off our gifts from Andrea and Joe. We were very surprised to find a bottle of wine on the coffee table in the room. It was from Guest Services, by way of apology (I believe) for the issue we’d had with the room the previous day. A lovely gesture but, since neither of us drink wine, somewhat wasted – luckily, we were able to find a couple of fellow cruisers who could make use of it
We had also received some more gifts (a pair of flip-flops from Elly in a Frozen bag, which Sian has since stolen from me) and a couple of recipe postcards.
Hmm, I recognise one of those postcards…I am guessing that Tony and Tee spent some time delivering postcards this morning.
We also got a cup from Mari with a sparkly
DCL logo on.
And we had received, from Jan and Dave, a big bag of goodies, including two beautiful glasses from Michigan, a tree bauble, some chocolate and some DCL decals. Although we weren’t participating in the Fish Extender gift exchange, we were taking part in a couples/individual gift exchange organised by Kathleen. We had bought for Mari’s husband, Jeff, and it seems that Jan and Dave had got our names. We loved our gifts from Jan and Dave, they were amazing.
After admiring all our presents and quickly changing, we set off to meet everybody at Diversions. It was absolutely packed as there was an Obscurity trivia event (similar to Pointless, for my British readers) going on. Gary ordered us some drinks (a Cosmopolitan for me and a Bud Light for himself) and we set about catching up with some of our fellow cruisers. Before long, Donna was waving the clacker which signalled the fact that it was time to move on and we all made our way to the Promenade Lounge. Here I had a Citron Martini and we found some seats with Sally and Scott. At some point this morning I had received a message (through the DCL onboard app) from Sally, telling me that the Royal baby had been born. We found it amusing that an American had broken the news to me – apparently, I should have been showing more interest.
One of our group, Jayne, had taken some of the wonderful graphics posted in our group and turned them into postcards, which she gave out to us all. They were amazing and yet another lovely reminder of our trip. Soon enough Donna was waving the clacker again and this time we moved on to Signals, by the adult pool. It was lovely and warm outside and we made ourselves comfortable in chairs by the bar. The rest of the afternoon was spent laughing, chatting and generally having a good time. At one point, Terry was applying some sun cream which was made just for men – we ended up just calling it ‘man cream’ which elicited many a joke over the coming days.
We hadn’t seen much of Tony and Tee today but, judging from the photos they have posted in our joint Photobucket account, I am guessing they went up on deck before dinner which, tonight, was at Animators Palate. I know they also went to Captain Puckett's talk and they also joined a few of our group to watch the Kentucky Derby in Diversions in the afternoon. Apparently, they had to use some persuasion to get Clayton to allow the sound to be turned up on the television. Unfortunately, none of the horses we had backed won. Still, we were on a
Disney cruise, therefore we were all winners!
Tonight’s show was the Prem-EAR of Avenger’s 2: Age of Ultron so there had been no hurry for us to get changed early since I didn’t want to see it and Gary planned to watch it later in the cruise.
Terry and Kim were already at dinner when we arrived, and we were closely followed by Julie and Jim and Tony and Tee.
Tonight was the Taste of the Caribbean menu. I chose the chilled seafood starter but couldn’t actually eat it – having only recently started eating seafood, I still can’t quite bring myself to eat it cold. For main, I had the veal parcel, stuffed with ham, cheese and pineapple, served with roasted onions and potatoes. It was very nice, although very slightly tough.
Gary had the Cajun Baked Bahamian Snapper, with saffron and leek mashed potatoes.
I had serious food envy over Terry’s rib-eye steak, which looked amazing. For dessert, I had a Mickey bar again. Terry ordered the Spiced Chocolate Cake. When it came, it was quite a small portion – Terry turned to Milan and said “Could I get a whole one please?”
After one bite, he had decided that it wasn’t very nice and turned to Gary saying “I’m gonna do the guy thing now. Dude, this tastes like crap – wanna try it!”
After dinner, we briefly considered going to the 80s Music Trivia event in WaveBands but we were all pretty tired so decided to call it a night. Tonight’s towel animal was a cool bunny with (cheap) sunshades!